


Swallowed in the Sea

by Bus_Kids_Burgade (Inthemorninglight)



Series: Never Have to Carry More than You Can Hold [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Car Accident, Dealing With Guilt, Original Character Death(s), PTSD, Simmons's backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 08:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8242606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inthemorninglight/pseuds/Bus_Kids_Burgade
Summary: How could you let this -She is that helpless little girl bobbing uselessly in the water and she has never stopped being that girl.Jemma's known she's the Angel of Death since she was ten years old. OrA study of Jemma Simmons and her unbounded guilt





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted by @fitzsimmonsaf on tumblr who provided the headcannon explaining Jemma's propensity to blame herself for everything (a headcannon I 100% believe is true)
> 
> Inspired by the promo for 4x03, and while most of the action happens pre-series or through s1-s3, some spoilers for s4.

“I’m not losing you,” she says.

 

She’s pounding May’s chest, beating her heart, putting breath in her lungs. It’s an order for May, for everyone in the room, for Death itself. But mostly it’s an order for her.

 

This cannot happen again. _How could you let this -_

 

It will not happen again.

 

But, god, the lights are out now, and darkness wraps around them like a cloud and she is back there, she is that helpless little girl bobbing uselessly in icy water and she has never stopped being that girl.

 

_How could you let-_

 

-

 

It was not supposed to happen. They were just going for a drive.To get milk and eggs and papertowels. And Jason was teasing her about something stupid and she was far more annoyed than she should have been and he was laughing and then…

 

She doesn’t remember exactly how it happened. Her memory cuts sharply from the warmth of the car, full of their mingling voices and fog curling around the windows, to being submerged in murky, bone-chillingly cold water.

 

In the police report it says they were rear-ended. In the police report it says they went through the guardrail. In the police report it says at some point the car flipped upside-down. She remembers none of this. She knows only that one moment she was bickering with her brother and the next she was treading water and she was alone.

 

-

 

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Fitz says the first time she brings him home.

 

He brought her home for Hanukkah, she brings him home for Christmas. It turns into their thing. But this first time, when he sees the pictures with Jason in them, the room down the hall with the football posters and cricket bats, still there even eight years later, he almost sounds offended. It isn’t unreasonable, coming from the person she’s spent virtually every waking moment in the presence of for the past two years and yet failed to inform of something as significant as an immediate family member. But the words still sting with a breath-stealing pain, and she pulls the door shut with a snap and stalks down the hall without a word of explanation.

 

He follows her with unspoken remorse, baffled but sincere, and doesn’t bring it up again, but later she feels bad because all the evidence supports Fitz’s assumption and he didn’t deserved her reaction.

 

“Had,” she says that night, letting the word float out into the darkness between them. He’s on an air mattress on her bedroom floor and somehow it’s safer to expose this wound when he can’t see her and she can’t see him.

 

“What?” his drowsy confusion reaches her slowly.

 

“I _had_ a brother. He died.”

 

The silence is heavy. She presses her lips together and breathes slowly through her nose, waiting out the ache deep in her chest.

 

“I’m sorry,” Fitz says finally. She hears him turn over on the creaky air mattress.

 

It isn’t the pat sympathy she’s used to, the uncomfortable, awkward, obligatory phrase. It isn’t even the pity she often gets when the story finally comes out. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her with that kind of softness, and it surprises her enough to smooth the jagged edges of the conversation.

 

They don’t talk about it after that. It becomes the one taboo topic between them. He never presses her, never gives into morbid curiosity and asks what happened or when or how, and she is silently grateful for it.

 

-

 

In reality, she was probably only in the water for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. In her memory it’s years. The sky was a bright, opaline white and the water a frothy gray and they were everywhere she looked, smooth and unbroken. She spun in circles, searching the empty landscape, waiting for Jason’s dark head to break the rippling surface. Waiting. Waiting.

 

She didn’t cry for help. She didn’t shout his name. She was a prodigy child with an IQ off the charts, and she could think of nothing to do except stare at the water and wonder where he was.

 

-

 

Given their altitude, wind resistance, the velocity at which she’s traveling, she can only have been airborne for three or four minutes. It feels like a lifetime. The sky is a delicate shade of blue and the ocean is a deep, beckoning sapphire and they are everywhere, bright and empty. She was not afraid to jump - her mind full of her team and the lives she wouldn’t be taking from them - but now she’s terrified.

 

She can feel the pulse building up inside her, wonders if she’ll know when it happens or, like the fabled gunshot you never hear, she’ll simply be gone, ignorant of her own ending.

 

She thinks, when a shadow swoops in from above her, when strong arms lock around her and a voice too low to be Fitz’s tells her they’ve got her, she thinks she must already be gone. For a second, before the shock knocks her unconscious, she’s sure this is Jason, he finally came.

 

It’s not Jason, of course. She wakes to find Ward sitting next to her. But the concern, the way his hands go automatically to help her sit up. It’s familiar. He lets her fall asleep against his shoulder while they wait for Coulson. He stands beside her while they are chastised. He makes fun of her accent.

 

It’s like she’s been walking around unbalanced for years. Because she still _feels_ like someone’s little sister, but if you no longer have a brother… can you still say you are a sister?

 

Now, though, her equation feels balanced again.

 

-

 

For days, weeks after, she tried to remember.

 

“Leave it be, Cricket,” her father told her, smoothing her hair back and looking at her with a lifetime of sadness. “The mind knows what it should and shouldn’t keep.”

 

But she couldn’t. The chasm in her memory sucked at her breath, threatened, like a black hole, to pull her into it. There was something important there. Something she needed to know.

 

-

 

At first, when she wakes in the hyperbaric chamber with Nick Fury telling her she saved Fitz’s life, she doesn’t remember. She remembers waking up at the bottom of the ocean. She remembers staring at the unimaginably vast blue and thinking she should be more frightened of it. But it was comforting, in a way. Like a friend she always knew was waiting for her. She’s always been destined to drown.

 

It’s _fitting_.

 

But somehow that didn’t happen. Somehow she found her way to the surface, and he didn’t, and this is all too familiar, too familiar.

 

But this time is different. This time he wakes up. This time she pulled him up with her. This time the memories come back.

 

In fact, they won’t leave her alone. They run marathons in her head, showing her all the things she should have done, all the ways this is still her fault.

 

-

 

When Jason went, he took their mother with him. This woman with her face and her voice would not get out of bed to take Jemma to school. She wandered the house at 3:00 A.M. She had to be dragged, thrashing and screaming, from Jason’s bedroom.

 

“Julia, please -”

 

“Get away from me! Don’t touch me!”

 

“The doctors are going to help. We’ll make it better, I promise.”

 

“They can’t make this better! They can’t _help_!”

 

There was a great crash of porcelain as the lamp was sent toppling from the bedside table. Jemma pressed herself further into the corner of the hospital room, wishing someone would wake her from this nightmare.  

 

“Julia, _stop_ ,” her father ordered, low, firm, pinning her mother’s failing arms to her sides.

"You’re scaring your daughter.”

 

Some sort of clarity edged its way back into her mother’s eyes as they landed on Jemma, as though she’d forgotten Jemma was there. She stopped fighting, standing slowly and taking a step toward Jemma who mirrored it with a halting step of her own. She wanted to throw herself into her mother’s arms, but a flickering unease kept her back.

 

“How could you let this happen?” Her mother’s voice was ragged and pleading.

 

“Julia - “

 

“How could you leave him there? He was a meter away from you! Why didn’t you try to help him? How could you just let him drown?”

 

“Julia, that’s enough!”

 

Her father was forcing her back into the bed, and her mother’s voice had deteriorated into incoherent cries, but Jemma was already out the door, running blindly down the corridor, dodging orderlies hurrying toward the chaos.

 

-

 

“Sir, I know the protocol in these circumstances,” she says through the glass, working hard to stay composed even as Coulson’s expression crumples. “But could you please tell my dad first? I just think my mum would take it better... if it comes from him.”

 

Her throat closes tight around the last few words and she can feel the prickle of tears.

 

“We’re not there yet,” Coulson insists. “There’s still time.”

 

But there isn’t.

 

“Sir, please,” she whispers, hoping he’ll understand, hoping, maybe, this doesn’t have to destroy her parents completely.

 

He presses his lips together and nods.

 

-

 

“She didn’t mean it, Cricket,” her father told her when he found her curled up in the stairwell.

 

“I know,” she said through tears, burrowing into his shoulder.

 

But just because she hadn’t meant to say it, didn’t stop it from being true. Because Jason hadn’t died from internal injuries or head trauma or anything caused by the crash. Jemma had read the police reports. Jason had drowned while she was treading water a few feet above him, and all the things she hadn’t done made that her fault.

 

-

 

“Don’t ever tell me there’s no way,” Coulson orders, voice hardening to granite. “It’s on you. Get it done.”

 

-

 

“You’ve got to fix this,” Fitz tells her through the glass, a wine of panic creeping into his words.

 

-

 

“Stop talking, just fix it!” Ward snarls.

 

-

 

“You have to fix me,” Fitz is begging her through broken frustration.

 

-

 

And Skye’s blood is pouring through her fingers and Trip is disappearing down the shaft and Bobbi’s bleeding out on her operating table because _she_ couldn’t kill Ward. Will is dying so she can live and Fitz is jumping through another damn portal and she let Andrew go and now he’s dead and so are a dozen Inhumans.

 

And Lincoln’s dead and Daisy thinks it’s her fault, thinks that death follows wherever she goes, but Jemma’s known since she was ten years old that she is the Angel of Death.

 

But Daisy leaves anyway and now she’s alone and doing God knows what to herself.

 

And now May is slipping away beneath her fingers. Because Jemma gave her an order.

 

This is not happening again.

 

“I’m not losing you,” she whispers.

 

And she doesn’t. But it’s a narrow thing.

 

-

 

It takes an age to scrub the blood from her hands. Her skin is pink and sore and there’re still bloody streaks. She wonders if they aren’t permanent stains by now, if they haven’t melded with her DNA.

 

This was a mistake. Clawing for power, putting herself in a position where her decisions could hurt so many people. She is infamous for making the wrong choices, for bringing everything crashing down whenever she tries to help. She is a disaster in human skin.

 

“Stop crying,” May croaks from the other side of the small medical room.

 

Jemma jumps and swallows a quiet sob she’d barely even noticed rising in her throat. She hastily mops her face on her sleeve and turns a smile to May.

 

“You’re awake,” she says brightly, scanning the monitors tracking May’s vitals.

 

“Thanks to you,” May says, raising an eyebrow.

 

“How do you feel?” Jemma asks, pulling a stool over to sit beside the cot.

 

“Like a dead girl tried to destroy my brain.”

 

“She’s not technically dead, it was actually -”

 

She breaks off when May cuts her a look.

 

“Right. Details can wait. The important thing is that you’re going to be alright.”

 

“Sorry to disappoint,” May says drily as fresh tears make an appearance on Jemma’s cheeks.

 

She brushes them away angrily. “I’m sorry. I just - I’m sorry.”

 

“You can’t break down after every crisis if you’re going to be the Director’s right hand,” May tells her, managing sternness even under her exhaustion.

 

“I don’t think I should be,” Jemma whispers, the words, like the tears, dropping from her without consent.

 

Because she is still that little girl in the water. And it only takes a questioning twitch of May’s expression to draw everything out of her.

 

“I nearly got you killed,” she gasps.

 

“Simmons - ”

 

“I gave the order. I sent you there without knowing what I was sending you into. I - I’ve made so many mistakes. I set Lash loose -”

 

“You need to let that go.” May’s voice has gentled a little. It seems to take a great effort, but she wraps her fingers around Jemma’s wrist. “Carrying every regret you have - it’s just going to burn you down from the inside out. And that won’t do anyone any good.”

 

“But all I do is make mistakes - all I do -”

 

The water is freezing around her, stealing her breath, turning her thoughts sluggish -

 

“- I can’t - “

 

He’s down there trying to pull himself out of the wreckage, him with his Oxford sweatshirt and infectious smile and knuckles scarred from years of boxing and she’s letting him -

 

“You saved me,” May says, firm, irrefutable. “You saved Coulson and Mack’s lives by sending me after them. And you saved yourself when you let Andrew go. It’s not a trade-off, that’s not how things work.”

 

She props herself up in the hospital bed to meet Jemma’s eyes more directly. “You did everything you could and that’s enough.”

 

May takes her hand back to ease herself back down onto the pillow with a grimace. Jemma pulls air into her lungs, breath after breath until they even out again.

 

 _You did everything you could_.

 

“You’ve got a lot of power, but you don't control the whole world,” May mutters, eyes already closed and voice long-suffering.

 

Jemma’s lips twitch as she stands to inspect May’s IV.

 

_How could you let-_

  
_You did everything you could._


End file.
